I would easily give this place 0 stars, but don't want to mess with their rating too much, as I am assuming there are plenty of people who enjoy it. Thus, this review is based solely on our experience here, where we did not even get to rock climb.
So hands down worst rock climbing experience that we have ever had. While we are definitely not experts, we have been rock climbing quite a few times (we go about a couple times a year), and typically visit Go Vertical in the city, Elite Climbing in NJ and also a place in Doylestown and have never experienced any issues. We were always able to do a quick review/refresher and start climbing and belaying within 10 minutes of arrival. Well here apparently you have to be triple certified to rock climb Mount Everest in order to not take their instruction class. BTW there is a Groupon online for this.
To start we came here on a Saturday, and the place is packed with kids for multiple bday parties. There are a couple high walls, but definitely the smallest overall gym compared to other places. However, there is a very large bouldering area, which is nice. It took quite a long time to check in, they have two computers to sign the waivers, and note that the majority of the number keys do not work, so you are basically entering dummy information just in order to move on to the next step (so since most people have a 215/267/610 phone number in the area that would lead to the conclusion that all of their waivers have wrong information). Then we had to tell the girl at the counter literally 3x to only put two of the three people on one credit card, and she still seemed confused. Best part is that when we were trying to get a refund (it is about $50 for two people, harness and shoe rental) they asked for my receipt (which I threw out) because they could not find me in the system...because the girl charged my card under another guest...So i literally had to log in to my credit card account on my phone to prove that we paid. However, that was still not the main issue of the day...
Since we have been climbing before we said we did not want to do the two Instruction classes required to do bouldering and belaying (which starts every hour in a group and is about 30 minutes and 45 minutes respectively). So they said we would need to pass a test in order to climb. Sure? They gave us harnesses (which were a brand which we have never used or seen before) to put on. After getting them on, one of the girls comes over looks at us and tells us our harnesses are on incorrectly and we have one more chance to go over our setup and correct any mistakes. They refused to tell us what was wrong with our initial setup. We looked over each others gear and my husband had a twisted strap which he corrected and we didn't notice anything wrong with mine. My brother in law was there as well and also didn't see anything else wrong with our setups. So after review the original girl we bought our day passes from comes over and says we have failed, and we need to take the Instruction class. Again....we were not about to scale Mount Everest, but were about to climb a wall in a controlled environment. And again, I totally agree that everyone should do things correctly, however, there is 0 reason to go through a 30 and 45 minute Instruction class when it would literally take 2 minutes to tell us what was wrong with the harness and also to quickly review the basics of spotting and belaying per all the other gyms we've been to. (We still never found out what was wrong with our harness setups)
At this point I just felt like we were getting trolled by the people there and we easily made the decision to get our refund, which turned out to be a challenge (see paragraph 3).
So in conclusion, if you are a first time climber then this place most likely will be fine for you. If you have kids and are here for a bday party, this place will be fine. For everyone else who has ever climbed before, would strongly recommend going ANYWHERE else but here. Actually right next door is SkyZone, where we ended up going to, and it was an awesome time! read more